Two years before the John Wayne classic Red River was released by Hollywood, the Australian film industry produced The Overlanders - a movie about an epic cattle drive across three states of northern Australia during the wet season.

Being a patriotic Australian, I'm disappointed that I had never heard of this particular movie before this week. It's an absolute classic. Sure, it's dated, and the acting and directing are not very good, but The Overlanders is a movie that beautifully captures the spirit of Australia. Set during WW2, the undermanned droving team drive 1000 head of cattle through wetlands and desert in the soaring heat of northern Australia, so that Australian soldiers in the north of the country, fearing Japanese invasion, can be supplied with beef.

The movie uses a lot of Australianisms and "strine" (Australian slang), and there's plenty of beautiful locations to admire, even if they're in black and white. As a depiction of Australian history, I found it fascinating. I was also very impressed with the explanations provided about how cattle behave on these long drives.

No doubt The Overlanders inspired the recent Hugh Jackman-Nicole Kidman movie Australia, which also featured a cattle drive, and which I thought was a dud.

By contrast, The Overlanders is definitely an Australian classic, and deserves to be much more widely known. 8/10.

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No nation or peoples can tolerate more than a small portion of alien peoples or races in their midst and still expect to survive racially and/or culturally - Betty Luks